The Right Man

Who owns Edmund Burke?

It may be the nicest compliment ever paid by one great writer to another. Dr. Johnson, talking to Boswell in 1784, said of Edmund Burke, writer, Parliamentarian, and fellow club member, “If a man were to go by chance at the same time with Burke under a shed, to shun a shower, he would say—‘this is an extraordinary man.’ If Burke should go into a stable to see his horse drest, the ostler would say—‘We have had an extraordinary man here.’ ” Burke retains his reputation for extraordinariness, even though what, exactly, made his thought so extraordinary may be hard to define. A “Burkean conservative” is the kind liberals pretend to want, just as conservatives like to say, in seeming praise of an opponent, “He’s a true Jeffersonian liberal.” Both mean, really, that the other guy is so pessimistic about government action that, in power, he won’t actually do anything. Burke’s doctrines are foggy even to his admirers. Let’s see, something about “the little platoons” of civil society, and then hating the French Revolution (though, wait, he liked the American one), and wasn’t there something about how mountains and storms are fun, in a scary kind of way? Burke is more a badge to be worn than a book to be read.

In “Edmund Burke in America” (Cornell), the historian Drew Maciag inventories the many contradictory roles that Burke has played in our local imagination, where, as he notes, “homage to Burke was more a profession of faith than an explanation of policy.” There’s Russell Kirk’s mystical Burke, of the early nineteen-fifties, a theological conservative whose thought was rooted in faith in a “natural law” derived from the Almighty (although Burke’s own direct statements of this faith when it comes to politics were, as Maciag says, “vague to the point of meaninglessness”); William F. Buckley’s Cold War Burke, who believed in gentlemen and hated Bolsheviks; and, finally, a staunchly pro-war, national-greatness Burke, conjured by the neoconservatives of the past couple of decades. (The book starts with the Bush Administration über-hawk Douglas Feith invoking Burke to defend the Iraq war.) Meanwhile, a new biography by the British Conservative M.P. Jesse Norman, “Edmund Burke: The First Conservative” (Basic), emphasizes a Burke who believed in stable communities, “civic virtue,” and free markets as the foundation of free nations—Burke as a mildly anti-Thatcherian figure for this new Conservative age. Unlike Thatcher, Burke certainly believed that there was such a thing as society, Norman insists, though he always thought it something other than the state.

Conor Cruise O’Brien, a fellow Irish politician and man of letters, came closest to making up a coherent Burke, a few decades back, with his fine intellectual biography, “The Great Melody.” (The phrase is from Yeats’s praise of Burke’s oratory.) O’Brien’s Burke is unapologetically various, a diva with a set of arias, but, above all, he’s a closeted Irish patriot, who hated reactionary abuses of power as well as revolutionary ones. The cause that took up more of his political life than any other was a campaign to impeach Warren Hastings, the governor general of Bengal for the British East India Company, for cruelty to the native Hindus—rather as if a contemporary Republican had spent his time in Congress crusading to have a Blackwater contractor in Iraq tried for war crimes. Yet to declaw Burke’s conservatism is to miss the blazing fury of “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” a book more prophetic than political.

Seen as a human being, rather than as a time-transcendent oracle, Burke is less that familiar species the Disappointed Radical, who swings wildly from one ideology to another, fighting for Indian dignity at one moment and for French monarchy at another, than the Shocked Liberal—the man of reform who, when reform turns to revolution, is driven around the bend by its excesses. Like those good Upper West Siders thrown for a loop by Woodstock and the Weathermen, Burke was harrowed by the Jacobins and the French Revolution. But the effect wasn’t to make him sour and stiff and drab, as usually happens to the disappointed: just the opposite. Gibbon, who was conservative in politics and infidel in religion, called Burke a “rational madman.” He meant that an element of beautiful overcharge was natural to Burke’s mind and part of his lucidity, making this reactionary a poet of the dawning Romantic style.

Edmund Burke was an Irishman with all the ambiguities that Irishmen in England felt in the eighteenth century. He was Irish to his contemporaries in the same way that Disraeli was Jewish to his: officially, not at all—Burke, who was born in 1729, probably in Dublin, spoke of himself unself-consciously as an Englishman—while, in the eyes of everyone around him, inescapably so. (The political cartoonist Gillray once drew Burke boiling a potato in a chamber pot.) His mother was a Catholic, and his father, a prosperous Dublin attorney and an Anglican, may have been reared as one. O’Brien convincingly argues that, without being a secret Roman Catholic, Burke was haunted by visions of eternal damnation. Certainly, he was always painfully aware of the brutality of a big power bullying a little one. He wrote once that there were “thousands in Ireland who have never conversed with a Roman Catholic in their whole lives, unless they happened to talk to their gardener’s workmen, or to ask their way.”

Before he was thirty, Burke married a young Irish Catholic woman, and wrote touchingly precise notes on the nature of the ideal wife he thought she was (“Her smiles are . . . inexpressible; her voice is a low soft music. . . . To describe her body describes her mind; one is the Transcript of the other”). Still, one of his best biographers, the American scholar Isaac Kramnick, argued, in “The Rage of Edmund Burke” (1977), that Burke was secretly homosexual. Kramnick issues all the usual caveats about labelling someone from the past with a social category that may not have existed then (though we call him a conservative, and that category didn’t exist then, either). Yet the evidence is that Burke lived for a long time in great intimacy with another man—the confusingly named Will Burke (no relation)—and was unusually sensitive to cruelty against those accused of sodomy. When two men convicted of “Sodomitical Practices” were placed in the pillory and, in effect, tortured to death (one was struck on the head by a stone; the other, too short for the pillory, was slowly throttled by it), Burke bravely spoke up in Parliament against the horror. For his efforts, he was accused in print of being a sodomite sympathizer.

Burke’s “rage,” an uneasy, near-hysterical thrum of unresolved ambivalences, vibrates in his prose. The presiding idea of his essay on “the Sublime and Beautiful,” finished before he was twenty-nine, is more radical than is generally grasped. The conventional answer to the question about why we want to see cruelty and pain in art is that, in some complicated way, it makes us more wholesome. Burke answered, honestly, that we like to go to violent plays for the same reason that people went to hangings: not because violence improves us but because it interests us, as long as it’s happening to someone else. There is no golden mean; anything mean is golden. “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime,” he writes in the essay. Or, as he puts it elsewhere, with a detachment almost like Sade’s, “Little more can be said than that the idea of bodily pain, in all the modes and degrees of labour, pain, anguish, torment, is productive of the sublime; and nothing else in this sense can produce it.” The essay on the sublime is also very good on the power of the incomplete and obscure: “To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes”—a truth that explains, among other things, why “Alien” is so much scarier than “Aliens.”

Burke writes with imagery seldom equalled in its potent eccentricity. In the midst of an extended metaphor in which the English in India are seen as frigate birds, he writes that, as they fly away from the land they have scavenged, their next “prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, in every breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean.” Of the Royal Court of George III, he declares, “It is shrunk into the polished littleness of modern elegance and personal accommodation; it has evaporated from the gross concrete, into an essence and rectified spirit of expense, where you have tuns of ancient pomp in a vial of modern luxury.” Elsewhere in the same speech, he makes the point that lots of old British institutions no longer serve much purpose:

Our palaces are vast inhospitable halls. There the bleak winds, there “Boreas, and Eurus, and Caurus, and Argestes loud,” howling through the vacant lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination, and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants—the Saxon, the Norman, and the Dane; the stern Edwards and fierce Henries,—who stalk from desolation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession of chill and comfortless chambers. When this tumult subsides, a dead, and still more frightful silence would reign in this desert, if every now and then the tacking of hammers did not announce, that those constant attendants upon all courts in all ages, Jobs, were still alive—for whose sake alone it is, that any trace of ancient grandeur is suffered to remain.

The last passage is a joke, and the hyperbole is intended to get laughs, but it has an odd poetic intensity of its own. Though Burke is dense in argument, he always writes and speaks from raw emotion. Warren Hastings said that, during Burke’s opening oration at his impeachment, he felt like the guiltiest man on earth—such was the strength of Burke’s power of crooning and convincing.

Burke was a prodigy, and then a placeman. After his arrival in England, in 1750, his literary fame got him a job as secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham, who was the leader of the Whigs—the party of aristocratic Parliamentarians, who were mistrustful of the King and of concentrated court power. Burke made his way in life by attaching himself to these Rockingham Whigs—getting elected to Parliament mostly from “pocket boroughs,” small ridings wholly controlled by local landed magnates. As Norman shows, after Rockingham’s death, in 1782, Burke’s influence dwindled, and then, after his turn toward the right during the French Revolution, he broke with the Whigs entirely. Still, the choice of politics paid off in a material way: the Irish adventurer died, in 1797, on his own grand estate. (In a nice symmetry, Burke’s estate was near Beaconsfield, the market town where that other great Conservative outsider Disraeli also found his estate and title.)

Burke’s role as spokesman for the Rockingham Whigs has dogged his reputation in England. Lewis Namier, a dominant modern historian of eighteenth-century Britain, regarded Burke as no more than an opportunist pamphleteer, a paid functionary of the Rockingham machine. Namier and his followers dismissed the idea that Burke had a mind and a philosophy or a set of influential arguments as a sentimental fantasy indulged by amateurs. The political world that Burke lived in was, Namier’s account suggests, really more like “The Sopranos” with snuffboxes than like any recognizable modern grouping of parties: various gangs of aristocrats, connected by blood ties and common interests, opposed other gangs of aristocratic oligarchs. O’Brien suggests at indignant length that the dynamic, as with Disraeli, worked largely the other way around: Burke did not find arguments for his patrons’ interests; his patrons came to understand their interests only after listening to Burke’s arguments.

The Parliamentary sinecure that Burke got from the Rockingham faction gave him what amounted to tenure, and the outline of his adult life more nearly resembles that of a modern professor than it does our idea of a politician. Burke was caricatured, again and again, as an intellectual in politics—beak-nosed, scrawny, shown as a bishop or a priest or a monk, waving books and crosses and crowns, his spectacles perched on the end of his nose. His work in Parliament, over the next thirty years, was devoted to three great subjects: the problem of America, the sufferings of India, and the meaning of the French Revolution. There is an American Burke, an Indian Burke, and a French Burke, and one of the hot topics in thinking about Burke is how different each of these is from the others.

One reason that Burke is so appealing to American conservatives is that, unlike other anti-Enlightenment thinkers, he supported the American Revolution. Actually, he was at first rather cool to the American position—partly because of its hypocrisy over slavery (“We hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes,” as Dr. Johnson said) and partly because of the Continental Congress’s hostility toward the Roman Church. But he came to doubt the wisdom of trying to rule a big country from a great distance, and of taxing people who didn’t get to vote for the people who taxed them. He thought the idea that you could run an empire on a balance sheet was crazy. Life took place in a theatre of values and traditions, and it was fatal to translate them into a merchant’s language of profit and loss. The real imperial glue had to be a commonality of interests and values. “As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you,” he argued. “Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce.”

In those days, it took about eight weeks for a letter or a newspaper to travel between Old World and New, as mail was carried on leaky and wind-tossed boats. There was no way to know that what you were saying today hadn’t been rendered immaterial by what happened last week. Burke was well aware of the difficulty: “Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat an whole system.” And yet each side’s ability to grasp the other’s position (or fail to), and to adjust its policy (or fail to) in the light of changing events, seems exactly as agile, or as clumsy, as it is today. In particular, the positions taken in Parliament sound the same as those we might have now regarding an imperial issue of our own. Some argue that to compromise with the insurgents would be to lose all credibility with other insurgents; others that just one more surge of troops will do it. We are no better, or worse, at understanding Iraq from instant video than the Brits were at understanding America from salty, soggy mail. Whatever the speed of the news, the speed of understanding never seems to change, perhaps because understanding is shaped not by our ability to get the news but by our ability to digest it. Knowing the day-to-day movements of a foreign adventure confers no more advantage than knowing the minute-by-minute movements of a stock. The range of responses is always the same: there are bulls and bears, loss-cutters and this-will-show-them-ers. When it came to America, Burke was a loss-cutter.

By far the longest and most passionate of all Burke’s political engagements was his fight to impeach Warren Hastings—who, as an executive of the British East India Company, was effectively the pro-consul representing British interests in the Indian subcontinent—for atrocities against the native peoples. The impeachment process, which stretched out over several years, involved some baroque political maneuvering, and ended with Hastings’s acquittal. Burke’s campaign has not worn well with British historians. Though the rule of the East India Company was doubtless often cruel and usually arbitrary, Hastings seems to have been far from the worst of the offenders. But Burke used the occasion to make a series of broader and still resonant points about the evils of colonial oppression. Describing the destruction of the Carnatic region of India at the hands of Hastings’s local allies, he wrote:

A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, and destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function; fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine.
Burke’s impulses and instincts are strikingly universalist: “There is but one law for all, namely, that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity—the Law of Nature and of Nations.” We stand aghast at the crimes of the British and their agents in India, Burke says, because the rape and murder of Hindus is just as great an offense to God as the rape and murder of our own. That is the point of his climax, where he talks, again, of the rape of the Carnatic region by a warlord on “our” side, and suddenly confronts the indifferent with the question “What would we say if it happened in England?” Burke inveighs:

When the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole region. . . . The Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to England. Figure to yourself, Mr. Speaker, the land in whose representative chair you sit; figure to yourself the form and fashion of your sweet and cheerful country from Thames to Trent, north and south, and from the Irish to the German Sea, east and west, emptied and disembowelled (may God avert the omen of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation.

To be sure, Burke wanted a more humane imperialism, a kinder colonialism, and behind his words is the continuing prejudice of a landed interest against a commercial one: this is what happens when merchants, rather than a military and civil establishment under the control of a better class, are allowed to rule colonies. (“We never said [Hastings] was a tiger and a lion: no, we have said he was a weasel and a rat.”) But, in the long history of colonial cruelties, his speeches against Hastings and the East India Company were perhaps the first modern instance where the sufferings inflicted upon an occupied people were held up in the capital of the empire and regarded as worthy of compassion, and punishment.

The American Burke is a model of rational prudence; the Indian Burke one of imperial responsibility and sympathy. The French Burke is not only the most influential but also the most tangled. Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” was originally a letter to a French friend, which he published as a pamphlet in 1790. This was at the very start of the whole bloody business, well before the Terror gained power or the King lost his head. But Burke saw, with a frightening clarity, which way the thing was tending: the Jacobins were ready to kill anyone who would stop them from trying to remake the entire world in the image of their idealism. Burke’s case against the Revolution is precisely that there was nothing—not law or reverence or constitution—to stand between the revolutionary certitudes and the people who were subject to them. In 1790, he grasped the truth that those poor Iranian moderates Bani-sadr and Ghotbzadeh learned after the 1979 revolution in Tehran: try and play footsie with the absolutists at a revolution and you will end up playing headsies with their executioners. (Bani-sadr, who went to Iran with Khomeini, sure that he could manage the mad old man, ended up fleeing for his life two years later, to find refuge—how Clio loves her little ironies—in a well-guarded villa just outside Versailles.)

Burke’s “Reflections” is, for many, a sacred text, and sacred texts, including political ones, demand amnesia as much as they reward attention. Admirers of Burke tend to pass over the degree of sneering and second-class snobbery that fills the “Reflections.” Burke hates the Revolution in France because it will sacrifice man to plan, but also because it raised up people you wouldn’t want to dine with—hairdressers and Jews and speculators. The most famous passage in the “Reflections” is his chivalrous but overwrought hymn to the glory of poor, dim-witted Marie Antoinette: “Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men. . . . I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.”

Even for Burke, the tone is oddly overwrought. Bertrand Russell once observed that a lot of the gloom of the early Church is due to the personal gloom of St. Augustine; and certain apocalyptic tendencies of modern conservatism may be due to the later Burke. It isn’t enough for him to say that something revolutionary is bad or cruel; the bad thing must be also ruthless, irredeemable, and very nearly irresistible. (And so begins that strange note, found to this day in American conservative magazines, whereby the most privileged caste in the most powerful country in the most prosperous epoch in the whole history of humankind is always sure that everything is going straight to hell and has mostly already got there.)

The Revolution in France worked its way around from the Terror to the more cautious Directory, and yet Burke never adjusted his tone. Burke was the prophet who saw Pol Pot coming when others saw Paradise, but he also saw Pol Pot coming when only more politics was on the way. When Lord Castlereagh, running British foreign policy during the end of the Napoleonic period, and refusing the Burkean demand that he wage preventive war in Europe on behalf of toppled monarchs, remarked, “This Country cannot, and will not, act upon the abstract and speculative principles of Precaution,” he was being more Burkean than Burke. The Republican principles Burke excoriated were exactly those which, after 1870, came to rule France (aside from the black hole of the Occupation) until this day, producing the wisest and wealthiest period in its history.

Burke overrates the revolutionaries so passionately that one slowly senses the odd message of this and similar paranoias: it is not that the other side has more faults; it is that the other side possesses virtues that we have surrendered. In order to fight adequately, we are going to have to regain those disciplined virtues; we will imitate even as we oppose. The Jacobins are intelligent, inspired, filled with the logic of their sacred texts, impassioned, hungry for martyrdom, tough, ruthless, ready to be selfless in the cause. (And so, later, the Communists will be, and then the Islamists.) This apocalyptic ring gives Burke’s last letters and speeches an uncanny emotional ferocity; in their half-prophetic poetic tone, they sound more like Ruskin than like Johnson, with a feeling for cryptic implication and monosyllabic incantation.

Indian Burke, French Burke—is there a Basic Burke beneath them? By “Burkean conservative,” we should really mean someone who has great respect for traditional order as a guarantor of social peace but not, on the whole, as a guarantor of liberty, except in a very limited sense. Burke’s thought reminds us that the two ideas joined in the phrase “liberal democracy” are less like Siamese twins than like a shotgun marriage. Burke was a liberal, of a sort, but not a democrat. He thought that the management of the country should be left to a class of rich farmers and professional Parliamentarians, in conjunction with a weak and biddable king, and that this was all the “democracy” anyone needed—provided that the people, in broad form, had a kind of general and respected veto on big questions, expressed, variously, through petitions, prayers, and riots.

That may sound like a terribly limited conception, but is it so far from the way politics is conducted in democratic countries? After all, in France a small class of highly educated _énarques—_graduates of the École Nationale d’Administration—conduct the business of the state, while in Britain, two hundred years later, Downing Street has become again an annex to the playing fields of Eton. What has expanded, one might argue, is the extent of the implicit veto. Workers have a veto now—the unions could do little to Thatcher, but she could not kill the National Health Service. Women have a veto now, as witnessed even in Missouri, when a politician says something beyond the bounds of insult. So, increasingly, do blacks and Jews, and those sodomites in the pillory can now stand up and demand that they be treated with decency. (Even a right-winger has to pretend to be concerned for their welfare, if not for their weddings.) Politics remains a highly distorted mirror of our country, but the mirror has widened.

Taking Burke seriously means taking ideas of this kind seriously, too, rather than pretending that he would have valued a gospel of success or modern mass democracy made up by “oeconomists and calculators.” A Burke brought back to life today, one feels sure, would have accepted gay marriage, as he would women’s equality, as expressions of a social order already altered from within. (Dr. Johnson put it best: “As manners make laws, manners likewise repeal them.”) Yet one also suspects that Burke would, half a century earlier, have been against desegregation, as something imposed on local communities from without. No one would have been louder about the horrors of Abu Ghraib or more inclined to bring Dick Cheney to justice for war crimes—though no one fiercer on the side of the Shah of Iran or more skeptical of the virtues of the Arab Spring. This double legacy, escaping conventional party categories, is what happens when one takes Burke seriously as a mind rather than as a sublime symbol.

That starting passage from the “Life of Johnson” may hold a clue to how best to “get” Burke now. For Johnson’s praise of Burke—the extraordinary man in the shed—doesn’t put Boswell in mind of Wilkes or Fox or Pitt or any other British statesman. It puts him in mind of Samuel Foote, the Robin Williams of the mid-eighteenth century. “Foote was a man who never failed in conversation,” Boswell says. It was natural to classify Burke as a performer. He spent his life performing, responding, reacting. The true Burke was inconsistent, as performers are: the right words depend on the night and the mood. The poor man shunning the shower in the shed would not have been impressed by the consistency of his principles. But then there were many men, in Johnson’s time, with principles so consistent that they would make you want to walk back out into the rain. It’s perfectly fair to call Burke reactionary, as long as we recall that most of his reactions were ones that any decent person would have had in the circumstances. That they were often inconsistent doesn’t make them less sane.

It was as a performer that he fastened on the theatrical, ritualistic, ceremonial side of life—the side of life that liberalism is least good at understanding or promoting. The original sin of modern liberalism lies in the idea of social life as a contract, a deal. Life is too short and horrible for us to imagine it governed by something as meagre as a contract; we want it to be governed by a covenant. The difference between a contract and a covenant may, in the cash value of action, be almost purely verbal. That’s its point. The sound is the significance. When the irrational is slighted, the unreasonable takes its place.

Burke had remarkable empathy for other people’s suffering from power, but limited sympathy for other people’s ambitions for power. He could be outraged on behalf of Hindu women raped or mutilated, but he did not think that the best way to protect them might be to let them run their own lives. Of all the critiques of Burke in his lifetime, the weirdest and wisest came from the visionary poet William Blake. Blake’s long prophetic poem “The French Revolution,” composed a year after “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” and with Blake’s usual combination of long, boring oracular bits and sharp, sweetly stabbing images, is (as the Blake scholar William Richey once pointed out), beneath the fog, a point-by-point critique of and answer to the Burke of the “Reflections.” Blake and Burke share the same impatience with reason overapplied to the wrong things; Blake’s motto, “One Law for the Lion and Ox is oppression,” could have come straight from Burke. But Blake, a man of narrower understanding but much wider sympathies, insists that Burke overestimates the residual power of the old sublime, the mists and mountains and ghosts of the ancien régime, the passing world of chivalry and nobility, and underestimates the capacity for a new kind of beauty that the Revolution might yet supply—particularly for all those guys normally stuck in sheds and stables. Burke is saying, The sublime mystery is passing! Blake is saying, Good riddance to it, as long as people can be happier in the new one. He has faith, which Burke lacked, in human fulfillment through simple pleasure rather than inherited order, and could see how pleasure might increase for the ostler and the street people inside the shed when the sun came out again.

There will come a time when all “may sing in the village, and shout in the harvest,” Blake says, “and woo in pleasant gardens,/Their once savage loves, now beaming with knowledge, with gentle awe adorned.” It’s another form of the Smile of Reason, with a sensual emphasis on the smile rather than on the reasoning. When Burke was talking away the rain, it must have been the look on his face, too. ♦

Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of “The Table Comes First.”